Income Distribution in Local Circular Economy

We are in search for a model - best possible balance. We are struggling for high returns to the producers. We are aspiring for high producer/consumer price ratio (ideally a prosumers). We want low water footprint (export) and energy (transportation) footprint.

We are a confused lot - about the need for homogeneity (everything available everywhere) and/or heterogeneity (local produce, local foods, local cuisine, etc). We continue to be confused - aspiring for premium markets and niche products vs production at scale and cheaper products.

Lets shape our future, lets discuss!

Role of FPOs in a Local Circular Economy

My imagination of a Farmer Organisation in a local circular economy context is to be doing the following -

1. Serving the prosumers; build and continuously enhance & deepen circularity

2. Promoting crop diversification and produce diversification 

3. Being in a collection of dung and cow urine, have a collective biogas plants, process for localised agri-inputs for sustainable agriculture (act as bio resource centres)

4. Have a cooperative stores in the village/panchayat collecting produce from farmers and selling it to people in the area (facilitate inter farmer crop exchange via coop) -equipped with coolers/freezers.

5. Collective price fixation (dynamic) based on cost of production and not based on market dynamics (insulated from the market price determination)

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Crop Diversification & Circularity

 While the direction in agriculture needs to be towards more diversification and circularity, we are moving towards market based production @scale models.

Increasing both water footprint and energy (transportation) footprint. Consolidation and corporatisation of agriculture through business enterprise models.

Do we need to redesign our models?

Impact of water on Local Circular Economies

I have been wondering some time now - while water is a basic need, water has been the most important input for improving livelihoods.

But, as I observe more closely, water is responsible for reducing agro-diversity, it is leading to gradual decrease in crop diversification as well as varietal diversification. We are moving from a natural circular economy (owing to diversified cropping pattern based on soil moisture availability) to few irrigated crops.

This is further exacerbated by the market models being promoted for exporting out water and soil nutrients.

From a more resilient system, we are caving into a dependent system.

I am perhaps archaic in my thinking, but within our own life time we are seeing reversals in our thinking and approaches! Will this reversal happen?

We seem to be contradicting ourselves, mor often than not!

"Local is the future"

As we continue to discuss on rebuilding our economies, few things that need to be considered are-

• We need to strengthen local economies through diversification of cropping systems, strengthening local markets, processing hubs, waste management etc.
• Rebuild systems to reduce attractive and opportunistic cropping systems and promote less resource intensive interventions
• Local markets should consume atleast 75% of the products in the region
• Ideally districts should be the hubs, a distributed network in the district should be able to engage local labour.
• Huge effort may be needed to protect and nurture the LOCAL but it may be worth the effort.
• This will protect the culture & regional specificities